No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.

The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24KB.

I still use vim over dial-up if I need to jot something down when I'm visiting my folks as they still use dial-up. Vim over dial-up via ssh connection is pretty damn fast, but then again, emacs probably is too, only emacs frightens me. ;)

I began in Linux on emacs, so I'm accustomed to it. The GNU creature doesn't scare me. I've used vim a little, and I'd have no problem figuring it out. I learned to program in MSDOS (and ProDOS, which nobody remembers anymore) with .bat files, so I guess I could learn vim.

My first distro had both emacs and vim installed, and I was using kate or gedit or some other gui editor. Eventually realizing the necessity of a console editor, I looked at both emacs and vim and both were kinda scary. I looked at the size of each and immediately removed emacs from my system. I went through the vim tutor and haven't used anything but vim since.